02 July 2010

HUD's New Direction

Found in the American Prospect:

The Reverse Commute

... Shelley Poticha, a small woman with a big assignment. As director of HUD's new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, Poticha is working to encourage a suburban nation to live in ways that make it feasible to walk, take public transit, and bike. Her goal is to make suburban sprawl a thing of the past by equipping local governments with the tools to build neighborhoods centered on public transit and walking.

....housing will no longer be classified as "affordable" based on the rent or mortgage alone; under a new system in development, financing formulas will factor in residents' transportation and utility costs, too.

....New measures to reverse the march of spraw may be too little, too late. It took seven decades and trillions in federal investment to create the sprawl that the Obama administration is now moving to brake. The first interstate highways rolled out in the 1950s with the present-day equivalent of $300 billion in federal funds. The suburban home industry was fueled by subsidies that today amount each year to almost twice HUD's entire budget.

***

"The risk is that the culture war ... will spill over into this field," .... "What should be a bipartisan, economic, and environmental quality-of-life issue becomes, 'Everyone who owns a car is the devil and is going to drive us off a cliff,' versus, 'The other side wants to take our cars away from me, and you're going to rip my hands off my steering wheel when I'm dead and cold.' ...

...A household with access to transit spends 9 percent of its income on transportation, compared with 25 percent for the car-dependent. Making households conscious of the true expense of car dependency is an important part of the Obama administration's sustainability project. ...

...In the stimulus, most transportation spending went to roads and highways because state agencies already had plans ready. But for the first time, a single program, called Transportation Investments for Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER), supported any mode of travel a local government cared to pursue, from rapid bus transit to bike lanes. Its $1.5 billion in grants lured proposals from unlikely places...

But mostly the administration is moving to do things for which it doesn't have to ask Congress to pay, such as influencing consumer choices through devices like the location-efficient mortgage, which gives homebuyers who settle near mass transit more borrowing power. The Obama administration is betting that such gestures can influence individual decision-making on a large scale by tilting economics to favor certain geographic choices over others.

History suggests that the landscape changes when economic habits become cultural ones, so ingrained that most of us don't realize why we act as we do. ...

"In my mind there's just a big myth that we can't change," Poticha says. "That isn't true. If we give people better information about making choices and then we deliver some options for them, there are just a lot more ways that we can grow our communities."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

you just cannot force feed this kind of change. take a look at the Obama recovery. is it only partisan when somewone disgarees wiht your anticipated outcomes?

CityKin said...

Federal policy can encourage sprawl or it can encourage urbanism. There is no neutral when deciding when and how to build roads...

Anonymous said...

Perhaps; asuming that "no neutral" envisions a car free future. Otherwise, commerce requries transportaion and that means roads and highways. Light rail, street cars, mass transit have a long and troubled history. We are not built like Europe nor likley to look like them from a population density perspective any time soon. I have been overseas and I have little intreest in living in the gernally cramped and dense conditions that I saw there. My guess is that would be the sentiment of most Americans given a choice. Besides, there is not enough 'federal' funding to support these alternatives.

BTW - love your website and your opennes to diverse thoughts. Have a great July 4th!

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous: That's fine, but if you decide to live in a low density setting, you ought to be expected to pay the true cost of that. Right now the preference we give for suburban living in the form of subsidized roads, development, etc. is just wrong.